It was the summer of 1982 and Seymour Stein was in a New York hospital recovering from an infection. The 40-year-old boss of Sire Records was listening to a demo a friend had sent him. Mark Kamins was a New York DJ who had been badgering Stein to let him produce a record. “I thought he had great potential,” Stein says, “so I gave him $18,000 to do six demos.”

Stein at Rough Trade record shop in LondonJOONEY WOODWARD FOR THE TIMES

It was the third of those demos that Stein listened to in hospital — a track called Everybody by a young woman who called herself Madonna. “This girl knocked me off my feet,” he says (presumably he wasn’t lying down at this stage). He rang Kamins and said he wanted to meet Madonna that evening. “I…

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